Dec 16

Dec 16 Balatro, Or How Joe Chivers Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Exponentials | Winter Spectacular 2024

I don’t want to alarm you, but Balatro is great. It’s the best deckbuilder that I’ve ever played, it’s compulsive, and it will steal hours from you if you let it. In return, you get the hot dopamine hit of NUMBERS… ever-increasing NUMBERS. The magic of Balatro is only partially down to what it is, a lot of its magic comes from what it isn’t.

While other deck-builders try to build a setting that’s coherent, like Slay the Spire and Monster Train, Balatro eschews such childish necessities as a story, lore, or a narrative-based objective. In Balatro, the only objective is to make your numbers go up faster than your opponent. I love this. The laser focus on just building up your score is so compulsive and so free of distractions. There’s nothing like the feeling of breaking the game so badly that your score has to be displayed using scientific notation.

I guess that when I started up Balatro for the first time, I was at a slight advantage: I love playing poker, but it really doesn’t make much of a difference. Once you get your first joker, the rules of poker will likely already feel meaningless. If you know how to make poker hands, you’re all good, and even if you don’t, the game will helpfully give you a list of poker hands. As soon as you get a joker though, you’re going to start pulling some moves that kick the absolute crap out of the rules of poker. Ready to make Five-of-a-kinds and Flush Houses? You’d better be, the numbers depend on it!

That’s what I loved so much about Balatro. It doesn’t try to be something it’s not. The lack of RPG mechanics, the fact that the game really doesn’t care about giving you a reason to play it beyond it being fun, and the fact that it completely owns it by being amazing is just stupendous. It’s a better game for being so focused on the core combinations that you need to make to beat the game’s blinds, the way that the game’s countless jokers allow you to exploit and break the scoring system, the way that you can quickly become incredibly overpowered like you’re playing a card-based Vampire Survivors. It all comes together to be nothing other than pure fun.

I’m aware that there is a risk that this comes across as quite a facile look at the game, or that the game itself can come across that way. The thing is, it really isn’t. Sure, we can deride games like World of Warcraft and The Division (which if you’re not playing on the bus, how do you know you’re living) for essentially being about making NUMBERS GO UP. These games demand much more of you than Balatro ever does. I don’t want to look at loot tables to learn about which kit has the best numbers, nor do I want my numbers to be ensconced within some modern military wank.

In Balatro, you are alone. Well, it’s you and the slightly unsettlingly smiling jokers. The company you have are the numbers ever ticking upwards towards heaven, your Tower of Babel that will inevitably fall, but not quite yet. I’m nowhere near as good at the game as some other people who I’ve seen play it, but no matter your skill level, the game seems to provide a universal thrill to everyone who plays it.

Ultimately, I guess that most games are about numbers in one way or another, whether seen or unseen. In its most concentrated form, you end up with something that looks like Balatro, a game that challenges you with one of the most base human desires, winning a game, translated into something that is so simple that a child could understand it. I absolutely adore the game, if you’d not noticed, and I love that we’re seeing, along with games developing better stories than ever, games that are able to stimulate your dopamine receptors with surgical precision. If you were to pick one game from the year that is the epitome of 2024, there is no other choice. Play the game, soak it in, and make the numbers go up.